Braunstein: the Roots of Roleplaying Games

In 2005 I was standing near the registration booths at GenCon, flipping through the event catalog while the posse debated where to go first. I had already scoured the listings online, but as I glanced across the pages I spotted a word I had somehow missed before: Braunstein.

I knew what Braunstein was (sort of) so I dragged my whole crew to the far, far outer reaches of the con, to a seminar in a very quiet room with very few attendants. And we sat, and we listened.

What did I know that made me drag them all that way?

I knew that Braunstein was the world’s first roleplaying game. Ever.

Most gamers have never heard of Braunstein. Sad but true. In the hierarchy of self-awareness you’ll find the circle of gamers who know what D&D is (a very, very large circle), then inside of that is the circle of gamers who know what Greyhawk is (large but smaller), and inside that the circle who knows what Blackmoor is (smaller still). And then in the very center, vanishingly small, are the people who’ve heard of Braunstein. Which is a pity, because Braunstein is the granddaddy of them all.

Major Wesely: The First GM

“French Lancer Colonel. His unit is hiding off the board at (B). He has infiltrated the town in civilian clothes to check out its defenses, and been arrested during the student riot last night. Starts in jail.”
–Braunstein 1

Once upon a time, tabletop gaming meant wargaming. Roleplaying games did not exist yet. Wargamers met and played out famous battles, recreating the last moments of Acre or the charge at Crecy and seeing if maybe with skill and clever tactics they could alter the course of history.

Major David Wesely took his usual wargaming group and tried something a little different. Instead of having them command armies he set down the two opposing leaders in a Prussian town before the battle, their troops nearby but not on stage. To give the other players something to do he let them control other people around town: the Mayor, a school Chancellor, some revolutionary students, etc. The humble town was the eponymous Braunstein, “brown stone” in German.

With that one small shift, playing your guy instead of moving your guy’s armies, Major Wesely and his players took a step into roleplaying. No, Major Wesely wasn’t a Major back then. And no he wasn’t called a GM or a DM, because Game Masters or Dungeon Masters didn’t exist yet.

But a GM is exactly what he was — the very first GM.

Try, Try Again

If you jumped in a time machine and asked Major Wesely how the first Braunstein game went, he would tell you it was a failure. A total mess.

In what was to become a familiar pattern to all GMs that came after him, he had prepared a game that he expected to go a certain way but once the players got their hands on it all hell broke loose. People running all over the place having secret meetings in corners, planning things the referee knew nothing about — total chaos. A referee’s nightmare.

To his surprise the players demanded more. So be it, thought not-yet-Major Wesely, but this time there will be order! Again setting a precedent that GMs would follow for generations to come, he clamped down with an iron fist to prevent the unpredictable chaos that had (he thought) ruined his game. Careful monitoring of player interactions! Limited communications! Basically eliminating all the things the players liked.

The history books tell us the next two Braunstein games were met with weeping and gnashing of teeth. The players were not pleased. They missed the freedom of the first Braunstein game.

And so still-not-yet Major Wesely prepared Braunstein 4. He moved the venue to a tropical dictatorship, complete with secret police, student revolutionaries, corrupt treasury ministers, and the grand leader El Hefe himself — a full-blown banana republic.

On paper Braunstein 4 looked like a wargame or a boardgame. Most of the players controlled units (army, the inland navy or the secret police) and filled out order sheets to send them places each turn. Want to take over the radio station? Send some soldiers!

And it might have stayed that way, except for the nefarious wiles of one player: Dave Arneson.

Dave Arneson: Gamer Ex Nihilo

“Peaceful revolutionary. Gets points for printing and delivering leaflets to each of his revolutionaries, and more for handing them out to other civilians (who may be agents or guerrillas of course…). Starts at home. (B-4)”
–Braunstein 4, Banana Republic

When you started gaming you read all these books, and they told you you could be a cleric or a thief or an elf (or a vampire or a Prince of Amber) and they told you you should probably pick a caller and set up a marching order and listen at doors and all that other stuff. You marched your character around and talked in funny voices. Sooner or later you may have realized that the rules didn’t drive the game, your imagination did.

But what if you never had any of those books? What if no one had ever explained to you what roleplaying was? Were you a good enough gamer to become a gamer without even knowing what a gamer was? Could you have just started being a gamer out of thin air, without anyone ever telling you how to do it?

Dave Arneson did.

He lied, swindled, improvised, and played his character to the hilt. He came to the game with fake CIA ID he’d mocked up, so when another player “captured” and searched him he could whip them out. Other players were still moving pieces around the board and issuing orders like a wargame while Dave Arneson was running circles around them and changing the whole scenario. He was winning the game entirely by roleplaying.

You may think of Dave Arneson as one of the godfathers of GMing, but even before that he was the godfather of players. He was, literally, the proto-player.

Modern Gamers: Teach Your Grandmother to Suck Eggs

Much later, having convinced his fellow players that he is really, perhaps, an undercover CIA operative, and that the entire nation’s treasury is really much safer in his hands, Dave Arneson’s character is politely ushered aboard a helicopter to whisk him to safety.

Far below the streets are still churning with fighting, plastic soldiers colliding with innocent citizens and angry rioters. In his lap sits the forgotten briefcase of revolutionary leaflets. “I get points for distributing these right?” And with a sweep of his arm he adds insult to injury, hurling reams of pages into the downdraft of the helicopter where they scatter and float lazily down upon the entire town…

Final score: Dave Arneson, plus several thousand points

Big whoop, you say, this is all old timey stuff. We modern gamers are way beyond dungeon crawls and listening at doors and all that primitive stuff. We have indie games and story games and narrative control and yadda yadda yadda.

Yes indeed. But even skipping the “standing on the shoulders of giants” argument or the “know your roots” argument, look again at what happened in that game: Dave Arneson was winning entirely by roleplaying. He isn’t doing tactical combat or playing some dumb-ass linear quest, he is making his own rules and being, for lack of a better word, an excellent player by any modern definition. He is making the game.

Don’t think Dave Arneson would kick your ass in some Sorcerer or Dogs In The Vineyard? Then you haven’t been paying attention. He would, as the kids say, take you to the net.

Modern gamers are pushing into new territory, but they’re also reclaiming old territory whether they know it not — the lands of their ancestors. If you’re an indie gamer or an avant garde gaming revolutionary, old school titans like Dave Arneson and Major Wesely are your peeps. They were trying things that had never been done before in their day too. They are your guys.

Missing History, Missing Meaning

What happened after Braunstein 4? Major Wesely went off to the army and Dave Arneson started running his own “Braunsteins” in a little patch of imaginary world called Blackmoor. He sent his players into dungeons. To resolve combats he used a miniatures rule system called Chainmail. The rest, as they say, is history. [save the usual “who invented D&D” debate for another time] I’m not sure, but I’m guessing that Braunstein set the color-noun trend in early D&D (brown-stone, black-moor, grey-hawk).

So why didn’t Major Wesely stay involved in RPGs as the hobby blossomed? Why don’t you know who he is?

When he came back from the army the “braunsteins” had moved from real world situations to fantasy battles against orcs and frost giants. He lost interest because while wargaming is an examination of history, fantasy looks a lot more meaningless. What can you learn about the real world playing a game with fire-breathing lizards?

Major Wesely, the first GM, may actually have been the first person to pan fantasy gaming as escapist nonsense. He was certainly not the last. In a way he was completely right, but what he may not have foreseen was that even the most blatantly escapist or mundanely tactical game can still be enlightening (not just entertaining) because we play it with other humans. The content of the game might not teach us anything about life, but the method, sitting around a table interacting with other people, does. Of course I can say that thanks to thirty years of gaming hindsight that he didn’t have, so big whoop for me.

Carry that forward and look at modern indie games, games that tackle ideas like slavery or destructive love or moral doubt. The question is the same as Major Wesely asked all the way back then: the desire to have real meaning or examine real issues in the content of the game.

Your Turn

This was a very difficult post to get on paper, because no matter how hard I try, this is still a fictional account. These are my memories of stories I was told about a game someone else played 40 years ago. It’s probably nowhere close to the literal truth, but hopefully it’s very close to the spirit of the truth. All errors or misrepresentations are solely mine, not the fault of Major Wesely, who is clear, informative and a hell of a fun guy to talk to. I also make it sound like Dave Arneson was the only player in the game, or the only good player, but of course that’s nonsense. Like any game there’s more sides to it than you can easily sum up.

So now you’re asking, what do I do with this slice of history?

Gary Gygax is no longer with us. Don’t you wish you’d talked to him? Don’t you wish you asked him questions?

So here’s what you do. Find the guys who are still here and talk to them. When you’re at GenCon this year, hunt down Major Wesely or Dave Arneson and pigeon-hole them and make them tell you these stories. Do what we did and corner Major Wesely in the lobby and don’t give him food or water until he spills all the beans about TSR’s dark past. Drop by Lou Zocchi’s booth and make him tell you about the limits of platonic solids. Put on your historian hat, not to venerate the past but to learn from it.

They are gamers just like you. Buy them a beer, take them out to dinner or just corner them in the hallway — do not let them escape! It will be an experience you will never forget.

Update: results of the GenCon 2008 Braunstein, game handouts, and pictures in Braunstein Memories.

[…] What? You say you don’t have a clue about this Braunstein? Well I fully recommend this enlightening article from Ars Ludi on the roots of roleplaying games. In fact, you must read it before continuing […]

[…] and natural. D&D sprang directly from the miniatures gaming of Chainmail and the early Braunteins. A fantasy series predicated on the arbitrary elimination of war and borders and nations is simply […]

klintron: Pandemonium is probably the best description. When we played at GenCon, Major Wesely spent a lot of time outside the room, interacting with players one at a time, but in the room people were just mingling and scheming. Action in the room often jumped farther ahead than he knew. I remember one point where I came to talk to him and he was about to talk about my drudge work repairing the wall as a drafted prisoner / student and I was like “That’s old news! I’ve talked the Jaeger Colonel into freeing me and giving me a commission to rout out traitors. I’ve been patrolling the town with my own gang of student militia. I’m Lieutenant Student A, now!”

I think the combined turns idea you have makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure being true to the original is even possible, because we can’t unlearn all the developments of 50 years of gaming. Even if we had a complete set of rules from the original Braunstein and tried to follow them verbatim, we would bring knowledge and experience into our play that didn’t exist in 1968.

I’m prepping to run Braunstein I here in Portland, OR based on the GenCon 08 handouts you published, the story-games.com thread about the GC08 sessions, and other various online writings about Braunstein (Chirine’s posts, etc.).

I know that it can’t be perfectly reproduced and I’m ok with that. But there is one thing I’m a bit curious about. You wrote on story-games that in Braunstein I, Major Weseley didn’t have any formal turns and order system. I’m curious then about how time tracking worked. I’m sure there were things people wanted to do that wouldn’t work in real-time and would require some sort of scene cutting or compressed time. Do you recall how that was handled at all? Was it just pandemonium everyone just on a separate timeline?

My idea for running IV, which I plan to do eventually as well, is to split things between “real time turns” and “compressed time turns.” Real-time turns would be, say, 10 minutes, and people could do whatever they could do in that chunk of time. Then they will be asked to write down what they want their character and any followers to do for the next hour. Then any necessary vignettes or resolution will be handled based on that, then back to a real-time round.

I might do that for 1 as well, but if I can figure out a way to manage it without the turn system, I’d like to do that.

I put a few more things I remembered about the Braunstein talk (finding gamers by seeing who checked out similar books in the library, players wanting to swim across the river and fight duels but there being no rules

[…] have people play the roles of people in between the wars”. And thus, the very first RPG was born: Braunstein. This game was basically the baby steps to Roleplaying. There were no major roleplaying rules and […]

[…] a part to play of a specific officer or townsman to add some realism – and called his game Braunstein. And he found his players had minds of their own and the result was complete anarchy. Very fun […]

[…] of games led to the development of role-playing games (RPGs) such as Dungeons and Dragons. The gaming lore (see also here) is that the first RPG took place in 1967. It was a version of a table-top […]

After becoming stranded in Jacksonville, FL. for a number of years, I became (for lack of RPGs) involved in wargaming, and have since loved trying to merge it with roleplaying in exactly the same fashion described in the article. This was a great read and very inspirational.

[…] piece on the origins of "role playing" and Dave Arneson’s role (pun intended) in it, I heartily recommend it. It is very hard these days to conceive of our entertainment industry landscape WITHOUT the […]

[…] piece on the origins of "role playing" and Dave Arneson’s role (pun intended) in it, I heartily recommend it. I t is very hard these days to conceive of our entertainment industry landscape WITHOUT the […]

But, of course, Braunstein was not the first, either. People naturally roleplay. It just takes a special kind of geek to need multi-sided dice to do it. :-)

People played Astronauts, Firemen, Cowboys & Indians, Cops & Robbers, House and *certainly* Doctor. And if we go back far enough, I’m sure that they played all sorts of other role playing games (depending on where and when they lived); “Roundheads & Irishmen,” “Guildhall,” “Athenians & Persians,” “Odysseus,” “Gilgamesh & Enkidu” or even “Sabretooth & Grizzly Bear.”

[…] What? You say you don’t have a clue about this Braunstein? Well I fully recommend this enlightening article from Ars Ludi on the roots of roleplaying games. In fact, you must read it before continuing […]

Just as a quick followup – there’s been some confusion about the new Open Game Table project and I just want to add that nothing will be published in Open Game Table until the author releases the material for inclusion in the Anthology. This post was simply submitted for consideration; which is the first step towards identifying the best in RPG blogging. Let me know if you have any questions over at the The Core Mechanic or in the OPEN GAME TABLE google group. In meantime, keep up the excellent work (!) and I’ll be in touch.

[…] Braunstein: the Roots of Roleplaying Games Most gamers have never heard of Braunstein. Sad but true. In the hierarchy of self-awareness you’ll find the circle of gamers who know what D&D is (a very, very large circle), then inside of that is the circle of gamers who know what Greyhawk is (large but smaller), and inside that the circle who knows what Blackmoor is (smaller still). And then in the very center, vanishingly small, are the people who’ve heard of Braunstein. Which is a pity, because Braunstein is the granddaddy of them all. (tags: games history rpg) […]

The original Source of the Nile rocked my world. I really like the idea of a game where the map gets erased should your explorer take a blowdart to the neck. And the crayon-based map-drawing technology of the time meant that a vague rumor of terrain was left to tantalize, if you chose. (IS there actually a three-hex Lake Oolabongakonga just past those mountains, or was that just the malarial ravings of a now-dead gentleman explorer?)

[…] crew that came to Major Wesely’s seminars you got to play in the first recreation of the Braunstein games in 40 years, the games that led to the birth of roleplaying games… but you probably already […]

I am trying to find my latest files from which I printed the handouts (apparantly on my PC at home, not here at work) and will be sending them on to Ben Robbins so he can send them out. If you have a handout go ahead. I will change the objectives and cast if I do it again next year, so everyone can be nice an confused by the old handouts! I think my copyright will be OK as long as no one is sellig them.
-DAW

Thanks Major Wesely, it was a lot of fun. I thought that years of intervening gaming experience would bias us too much (we wouldn’t recapture the “innocence” of the first game) but actually playing the game really gave me a whole new perspective.

Is it okay to post scans of our handouts? A lot of people who couldn’t make it to GenCon would really like to see them.

One of the things that was interesting to me, as a participant in Braunstein I (v2), was how the situation made everyone into the main character of the story. Ostensibly the two main characters are the French Lance Colonel and the Prussian Jaeger Colonel. But because the game didn’t take place around the tabletop, I had no idea what others were doing, and so I really had to fight for my character.

If we had been playing around a table, I would have seen some of the higher-level machinations going on, and I might have become more interested in the issues surrounding the defense of the city. As it was, from my perspective Braunstein I was all about the Student B (the Baron’s son), his rivalry with Student A, and his growing radicalism as all the townfolk turned against him.

Thank you, Major Wesely, for staging the reenactment. It was quite fun and also educational.

Well-
The (approximately) 40th anniversary restaging of Braunstein 1 and Braunstein 4 at GenCon 2008 went pretty well. Thanks to all of you who took part. I have been asked to do it again next year, and I am working on revised scenarios, so those who played this tear will not have too big an advantage if they play again.

BS1 went a lot better in 2008 than in the first run, partly because I have learned a few things about being a GM in 40 years, and partly because there were only 12 players to handle in this game , rather than the 22 who showed up (about 12 more than I had expected) for the original.

The BS4 restage was pretty good, but I could have used 4-8 more players, to give more confusion and conflict. 16 players would seem to be about the right number.

Thanks again for coming to the games at Gencon 2008. See you next year.

[…] off to GenCon, Ben Robbins at Ars Ludi has a straight-from-the-horse’s mouth piece about David Wesely and the proto-roleplaying game Braunstein, the taking-off point for my two old posts about the deep history of roleplaying games and Cold War […]

Hello David (I’m not sure if you’d prefer Major Wesley. I can switch over to that),

I was wondering if you considered the referee role in those games (and perhaps game you play now) as being like a referee in sport, where the ref makes a call when a situation isn’t covered by the rules. Typically those situations aren’t intentional – they just happen. But in your early braunstein games, you might get someone saying they will swim across a river. It’s not in the rules and it’s actually a deliberate attempt to enter a situation not covered by the rules. Yet at the same time, in terms of fiction, someone swimming across a river doesn’t seem implausable.

I was wondering what you thought of that deliberate attempt to enter a situation the rules don’t cover Vs plausible fiction and whether the referee role is getting modified in the process? Would you want the referee role to be modified or not?

You might also be interested in another important early Lake Geneva-area figure by the name of “Uncle” Duke Seifried. He was running these kinds of borderline roleplaying/miniatures battles out of his home and at conventions. He runs all-day free-flowing team games with Seifreid acting as a very-enthusiastic judge & cheerleader. IIRC, he sculpts and casts his own miniatures and was among the very first to make fantasy miniatures – LOTR, Barsoom, etc., essentially for his own games.

We’re really looking forward to seeing you at GenCon, and as you can see we’ve got a grass roots movement going to flood you with people brimming with questions. If the schedule’s really messed up we can just spill over into the Embassy Suites lobby / bar, so no worries there.

Good work Ben. You have done a lot from your memories of one talk and one fairly long interview and I didn’t see you taking notes, either time!

The only “correction” I would make is that itt was not my rejecting fantasy elements that disconnected me from D&D (though I did find them a bit of a barrier to getting into it when I came back from the Army). Rather, it was that most of my Blackmoor/D&D playing friendsl moved down to Lake Geneva as they graduated, while I stayed up in Minnesota in graduate school and then went back into the Army until 1978. So while D&D was going from a new game by a little company no one had heard of to a nationwide sensation, I was getting to talk to my old buddies on the phone and maybe play in a game once every four months.
As a TSR stockholder, I got to hear about what was going on, but had little input to product development. When I got back into gaming, I wound up designing Valley Forge, Source of the Nile and a series of early computer games… but you can ask me about that at Gencon.

I look forward to seeing you and Ping at Gencon, where I will be running Braunstein I and Braunstein 4 so you guys (and I hope at least eight more people) can try to play them.

By the way, the schedule for my “seminars” on the internet says they are for 2 hours…
starting at Noon each day. They are supposed to be for four hours, as they always have been. We will see if this is just a typo on the net , or somebody really messed up in scheduling rooms, as soon as I get my hands on a progam book.

I put a few more things I remembered about the Braunstein talk (finding gamers by seeing who checked out similar books in the library, players wanting to swim across the river and fight duels but there being no rules) in your Braunstein thread on Story Games.

I liked reading this a lot. I know a man who was in the Army Reserve for many years, and for much of that time he was involved in training officers in military history and wargame simulation. Whenever he spoke about it, I couldn’t help but think that the combination of military knowledge with gamer’s sensibilities could have made the simulations so much more cinematic. To this day I’ve no idea how successful any of it would have been, but one can dream (or break out the dice!).

Great post.
In a wilderness of gaming irrelevance and minutia, you have produced something meaningful.
The current poll on the CBG (Campaign Builders Guild) asks the GM’s how old their games are. The reason I bring it up is that games/systems do not remain static, but evolve, as your story reveals. And if more people did as you have related above, if there was a little more understanding of where people have found the fun and the things they have tried, I think many games would be a lot better.

And it is less important how long you have run a game than how long you have kept your players…:)